I am a landscape architecture student at the University of Oklahoma. This is a place where I can explore links and relationships of landscape and Oklahoma.

Jord Wilson

DAYS TILL GRADUATION

Graduate Student of Master of Landscape Architecture;
Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design;
Minor in Interdisciplinary Principles of the Environment;
College of Architecture;
University of Oklahoma

wanderings

I was born in Oakland California. I grew up in North Central Washington, in the eastern foothills of the Cascades and on the Columbia River. I graduated from a school of 250 students K-12. I didn't attend college until after I was 30, so I brought to school my experience: garden designer, carpenter, concrete worker, florist, greenhouse manager, perennial expert, shrub and tree salesman, bus driver, truck driver, apartment manager and maintenance man. Frequently I worked 3+ jobs a day during my go-get-'em-like-your-killin' -snakes years. So I was well prepared for the vigor's of the University and the initiation rituals of the Architecture department. I graduated from the College of Architecture with a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design and a minor in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Environment. College has allowed me to bundle my many paths into a single and wide corridor. I started my Master of Landscape Architecture program at the University of Oklahoma in the fall of 2006.

bearings

Knowing where I've been is the easy part. Knowing where I come from and where I am going is the challenge. I moved into a little rent house out in the country about 15 miles south of Norman Oklahoma. During my first winter in Oklahoma, I dabbled in some genealogy. I found two great-grandfathers and their families buried within a few miles of my new home. It was not just serendipity that my internal way-finder connected and centered me in the place of my forefathers. I have a deep connection with this place.

compass

The spirit of place.Present and past human connections influence our lives. Community, family and place are part of our soul. Regional identity is both cultural and physical. The spirit of place is what nourishes our beginings and tethers our world view. It is also that soul and bond that embraces our community. Technology has allowed us to disregard the environmental aspects of place. The media wants us to believe we are a global society and that our world is getting smaller. Our world gets smaller when we exchange our spirit of place for anothers. The spirit of place must be unearthed again to regain the comfort of belonging.

Vitale was chosen to represent the ASLA in the development of the second Chicago's Worlds Fair. Vitale would die before finishing this work and Alfred Geiffert, Jr. stepped in to complete the commission. The fair was on the same site that Fredrick Law Olmsted had chosen for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

Instead of the Beaux's Arts fair of 1893 the Progress Exposition was "to have a new architecture born out of new technologies, materials, and construction methods, new lifestyles, and a new economy, one that called for sparseness and frugrality..." (Ferruccio Vitale by R. Terry Schnadelbach.) Interestingly the fair was to be about new American Architecture and the Prairie school architects were passed over. Ferruccio Vitale is the Landscape Architect added to the Commission.

It is too bad that Vitale's poor health, untimely death and the great depression hindered his work on the Progress Exposition. The license the fair gave the designers to design at will in this new Modern style was a place for creativity to grow.

I still find some great examples of Landscape Architecture stretching out and adapting to Modern Architecture. Ferruccio Vitale seemed very comfortable expanding out into this world.